Counting World War death caused by direct and indirect human violence will never ever give us exact numbers, still we can know the magnitude of teh histroical event, whereby even what was the beginnening and what was teh end date remain something that is not fixed… I show here just grand total numbers and there main differences low/high numbers. My source is a very well documented Wikipedia page (English version) “World War 1 casualties.” (left hand QRcode has the direct link).

(It started with a message I wrote for my Facebook timeline reacting to the picture below just appearing on the internet; the picture expressed my disgust for all the imperial state pomp shown in mass media… so I wrote the following…)

Centenary of mass butchery in the name of empire nations…
“the hand writing is on the body”…

away with the glorification of the battlefield, the courage of soldiers and how we are indebted to their futile sacrifice for whatever honoured pride nations… who speaks about those who refused to be called to arms, those who refused to climb out of the trenches right into the spitting canons and had to be forced at gunpoint by “their” officers, about the mutineers on all fronts, at times across the lines of the fronts…

World War I was – statistically speaking in fatalities – a predominant male war enterprise and I find it liberating to read these handwritings on soft female bodies at this occasion to break through the pantsers of official historical commemorations.

{message to the potential Facebook censors of the photograph… censoring this picture can be considered a warcrime; it is also a picture that has been widely spread though main mass media today, so censoring would be a futile act as well}

More photo documentation in the Daily Mirror that has this contextual info: “Bare-breasted feminist activists were arrested after staging a protest against world leaders at a World War 1 remembrance ceremony. The Ukrainian radical activist group ‘FEMEN’ were demonstrating outside the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France where world leaders were commemorating the 100th anniversary of WW1.

Their stunt on Saturday morning began with the topless radical feminists jumping out of a car at the Place de l’Etoile before climbing the barriers of the platform. Beneath the arc is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which plays host to an annual commemoration event marking the anniversary of the 1918 armistice signed by Germany and the Entente Powers. This is where 70 world leaders are expected to attend the ceremony marking the centenary of the war’s armistice on Sunday. “

It is about the ‘doublethink’ of ‘newspeak’ … at the time of publishing his book “1984” in 1949 Orwell had very much the Soviet Union in mind as a totalitarian empire… which practiced such brainwashing as is implicit with ‘double truth’… now in a next century we can notice that the art of ;doublethink’ is still with us…

“Macron denounces nationalism as a ‘betrayal of patriotism’ in rebuke to Trump at WWI remembrance”

… so ‘nationalism’ is the dirty word here and ‘patriotism’ the good one. Let’s check some standard definitions:

– “Patriotism or national pride is the ideology of love and devotion to a homeland, and a sense of alliance with other citizens who share the same values.”

– “Nationalism is a political, social, and economic system characterized by the promotion of the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining sovereignty (self-governance) over the homeland.”

Both definitions come from the English language Wikipedia pages for these words/notions. So where lays the supposed opposed meaning of “homeland” and “a particular nation” … is ‘a particular nation’ not also a ‘homeland’?

Indeed Macron uses doublethink and doublespeak, opposing the notion of patriotism and nationalism as they are only on the opposite sides of the same coin. As what any patriot or nationalist will say to those who come with criticism: “Love It or Leave It.”

4 Responses

a salutary post .. and all the more ironic that the ‘demonstration’ be carried out by FEMEM acitvists in this year when the Suffragette film so ignored the work of the pacifist NUWSS. The rampant and militant nationalism of Pankhurst when war broke is misinterpreted if not just overlooked.

Well the Panhurst..s (plural) is a family with curious uniting and diverting life trajectories… I am aware of that. I do remember reading materials by and on Sylvia Pankhurst and now I see your comment I just checked to see if I could delve a bit into this WWI peace and women’s movement issue… I did find (and was able to download a pdf version) Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War; Jo Vellacott (auth.) Year: 2007 Language: English Pages: 244 ISBN 13: 978-0-230-59206-3… it will take me a while to find time to at least go through it. As a curator and collector for the University Library of Amsterdam I did for almost two decades visits to London alternative bookstores and especially Housmans Bookstore (Caledonian Road) was a treasure trove. I do remember the days that Harry Mister (1914-2006) was running the shop and also Allen Jackson and them telling about conscious objection ‘the hard way’ during wars that fuelled patriotism.
If you do have firther reading suggestions let me knwo.